Credit: https://sonic-pi.net
To say that digital technology has revolutionised the world of music is a massive understatement. Starting with the introduction of the audio CD in 1982, and continuing through to today’s streaming services, for the vast majority of people, listening to music is a digital experience, despite the recent vinyl revival.
And the change has been no less dramatic in the realm of music composition, performance, recording and post-processing. Music notation software has largely displaced pen and paper and, let’s face it, when did you last hear of music being recorded on a multichannel analogue tape recorder? Our subject here, though, falls between these two extremes of music consumers and professional musicians. Here too, digital technology comes to the fore in the form of what we’re calling algorithmic composition. And even if you don’t need royalty-free music, you’ll still get some hands-on experience of this intriguing type of software.
A history lesson
Let’s go back to Austria in the 1790s. Attributed to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, , which means , involves generating waltzes from the repeated rolls of two dice. Like most schemes for algorithmic composition that followed, despite the random element, the rules ensured that the laws of music were upheld. What’s more, it’s in keeping with our aim of enabling non-musicians to create music. As Mozart says in the introduction to
